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Per their latest annual report: "As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20%
by razwall 4y ago
Per their latest annual report:
"As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 69% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations."
- simonw 4y agoI wonder what the difference between "customer success" and "customer operations" is here.
- kube-system 4y agocustomer success is probably the long term, proactive activities: keep the customer happy, manage renewals, be proactive. customer operations is probably the short term customer interactions: support tickets, integration support, help desk, etc.
- to11mtm 4y agoIIRC (It's been a while since I've worked with their teams) Customer Success was handled by the 'integration support' at Docusign. If I -also- recall, When I did an Auth0 integration (a few years before that) I worked with a similar 'Customer Success' specialist while evaluating for an integration. I think this is the trade-off that's happening; By putting integration support under a 'marketing' budget rather than a 'support' budget, it allows for a happier adopting customer base. I must add however; those examples stand out to me not because it was 'sales-y' but because they were extremely memorable times of a vendor team working very hard to lead our teams into a pit of success. The best analogy I can think of is the difference between someone on a call giving a vague phrase you have to search through API docs for, vs a direct link to documentation complete with verbose-yet-sane examples.
- quickthrower2 4y agoCustomer success: Churnbusters Customer operations: ?? No idea never heard the term
- mrguyorama 4y agoOne gets paid big sales commission bucks and the other does the actual work and is told "we can't afford a raise this year"
- lupire 4y ago"Customer operations" is actually "customer success operations" -- it's the non-customer facing part of sales and support - the IT systems they use. "Success" is just a a smarmy word for "sales and support".
- softveda 4y agoIn a very crude way, sales is about landing new deals or expanding. Customer success is about securing renewals for existing customer and increase adoption, prevent churn. It is a post-sales role.
- petesergeant 4y agoEng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head
- brianwawok 4y agoThat is still mind blowing. 1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.
- kube-system 4y agoCompetitors have also done it with 1% of their revenue or less.
- suzzer99 4y agoI've been impressed by Docusign the few times I've had to use it. And I generally hate 95% of the software I come across. Everything seemed to snap into place, was perfectly intuitive. That stuff is easy to get wrong, as evidenced by all the crap out there.
- collyw 4y agoIt's not managed to annoy me, which is quite impressive. I never really considered Docusign anything special for usability, until your comment, but that's because it gets out of your road enough not to notice it.
- ghaff 4y agoAnd it may be worth noting that the alternative is often to go physically into an office someplace or get various notorizations or Medallion Signatures through your bank.
- collyw 4y agoI was suspicious of the legality when I first got asked to sign, but I assume a legal team makes up a part of such a large workforce.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative Ratios like this are fairly common. I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount. A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers. Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers.
- acchow 4y agoI bet there's some market analysis of SaaS companies showing how differently they can be run. I wonder if it's bimodal - SaaS with <10% sales headcount, and SaaS with >50% sales headcount.
- mikestew 4y agoI think the confusion comes from... For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.
- tomcam 4y agoUnfortunately those numbers only increased my confusion. The breakdown of that 67% as baffling to me
- mikequinlan 4y ago20% of 7,461 is still 1,492.2 employees, which sounds like a huge number.